Mother's Day
by Gaia'schild
Summary: When the command team of the Enterprise start talking about Mother's Day, Bones should have know that Jim was going to run for the hills because Winona Kirk had not been the ideal mother at all. Rated M for angst and language.


Mother's Day

He should have known. All the little signs were there. God damn it; he was a doctor; he's paid to notice the little things around him, even if they were in the peripheral. It's what made him such a well-known doctor at his young age and shocked all those curmudgeons in Georgia, his ability to notice every nuance of each patients and then draw the pieces together and to figure out how to cure them. He's Jim's friend. He should have known.

All week he's heard about what each crew member is sending back to Earth for Mother's Day. Never mind that packages won't get there for months; never mind the fact that it's an archaic holiday. No, everybody had to break out the sob-stories about the women in their life and celebrate how wonderful they were. He found it disgusting.

Everybody was celebrating but Spock and Jim. From what Uhura told him, Spock had celebrated a version of Mother's Day when his mother was alive and Vulcan was whole. Amanda Grayson, God rest her Soul, had wanted her son to embrace his human side as much as possible and as often as possible. Bones could understand why Spock was uncomfortable about celebrating the holiday this year; almost nine months had passed since the 'Nero Incident' and that green-blooded lump had yet to open up to anyone about losing his mother, at least not to his knowledge.

But Jim never had celebrated Mother's Day; in all those years together at the Academy, living together and surviving the general sickening happiness of the damn place, Jim had never mentioned Mother's Day and rarely talked about Winona Kirk, his mother. If it hadn't been public knowledge that she was still alive, he would have been concerned that Jim had been raised by Frank alone. And he had woken Jim from enough nightmares to understand what kind of brutal beast that sick bastard was.

It had seemed harmless at first, almost all the alpha Shift officers were sitting at one table in the Mess Hall for diner, talking about their mother and what neat trinket from a foreign world they had remembered to buy and then send back even if they had forgotten about it in the between time. Even Spock had mentioned what he had given his mother when he was just a small child—a green-blue vase that reminded him of the planet his mother came from. Only he could be logical about a completely stupid holiday. But then Uhura had turned to the Captain who had just sat down with his plate of food and asked him what he had sent his mother.

Jim had had the perfect deer-in-the-headlights look, one Bones wished he could have a holo of for when an away mission didn't go as planned and he needed a laugh. 'I don't know what you're talking about Uhura. Why do I need to send a present home?'

'It's Mother's day tomorrow, Captain,' the dark-skinned woman had pointed out to the bewildered man. Picking up her fork she had gestured at him before returning to her salad, 'You should have sent something home by now, but I'm sure your mother would understand that as a Star Fleet captain you've had a quite a bit on your mind.'

'I've never celebrated Mother's Day. Winona was never home long enough to.' Jim had started to fiddle with his food; he could face down Klingons and Star Fleet Admirals, but get near his family or past before the bar fight that brought him to Pike with even a twenty foot pole, and he closed up faster than a clam.

The xenolinguist had seemed oblivious to the subtle look that Bones was throwing her and the hunched shoulders of Jim that screamed of a cornered animal. 'So formal Captain, _Winona_.' Uhura had quoted the stiff man with a smile in her eyes, 'Why don't you call her Mom, or some variant of it? Seems appropriate with the holiday coming up. Would you like me to find where she is stationed at the moment? I'm sure that a call could be scheduled for the Hero of the Federation.'

That was it; Jim's eyes betrayed the building panic within at the idea of where these questions were going. 'I wasn't allowed to call her mother,' Jim had fired off quickly as he jerked to a standing position. 'Now if you excuse me, I have something I need to do.' Dumping his untouched food into the recycler, the Captain had all but sprinted out of the Mess Hall. If only he used that speed to get out of the way of phaser fire, Bones would have a few less grey hairs.

Bones turned around to look at the table's reaction and was drawn to Uhura's stuttering and startled face.

'Wasn't allowed to call her mother? Oh no, he's not just going to leave it there.' She had made the motions to rise, putting her silverware on her plate, but Spock placed a hand on her shoulder—effectively restraining her.

'I do believe that the Captain would appreciate being alone,' Spock had remarked to the confused faces that had wanted Uhura to interrogate more answers from Kirk. 'He has, within my knowledge, never spoken about his mother to any individual at this table; it is logical to assume that further discussion it that direction would make him uncomfortable given his reaction to the Lieutenant's questioning.'

Uhura hadn't seemed to want to let this matter go unsolved, 'But maybe it was all a misunderstanding from when he was a teenager. He was a pompous idiot when we first met; he must have been the same growing up. His mother just needs to see that command has screwed his head on right finally.'

Spock had merely raised his eyebrow, and the young woman had plopped back into her seat, arms crossed over her chest.

Damn that green-blooded hobgoblin, but sometimes her could read Jim as well as Bones. No matter, the crew had broken their captain and as the chief medical officer and good friend it was his damn problem to put him back together and figure out what broke him in the meantime. Swigging tow the last of his delicious sweet tea, he had stood up and faced Spock. 'I'll go find him.'

The Vulcan's eyes had seemed to ask the doctor if he required assistance, but he had merely shrugged his right shoulder as if to say I'll come to you if I do. They had both nodded to each other, and then Bones had made his way out of the Mess Hall, trying to mental put a list together of all the places Jim could hide on a Constitution Class star ship. Knowing Jim's love of the enterprise, there were a lot.

/…/

As he rounded the corridor leading to Astrometrics, Bones knew he was running out of places that Jim could be hiding. If this went on much longer, he'd be madder than his grandmother when he had broken her favourite plate. He decided right then that if his missing captain wasn't there, he'd ask the computer to run a bio scan for him of anyone matching Jim's physical features; he had checked if the computer knew where the kid was, but Jim had taken off his communicator. Sometimes Jim could be so smart and yet so dumb.

Stepping into Astrometrics, he knew he was in the right place at last. It was dark, because it was hardly ever staffed outside of alpha shift, and only when they were actually studying a celestial body. But tonight there was a holo of Earth's sky glowing on the ceiling—a comforting image that Bones missed while on the ship. And there, sitting in the corner, was Jim.

Bones soundlessly made his way over to where Jim was sitting and slid down the wall to join him in watching the stars glitter in complete silence.

The doctor couldn't say how long he sat there with his friend in the dark before Jim finally cleared his throat and began to speak. 'She was always nice to Sam, fresh baked cookies and bed time stories all the time; but not to me. When turned five, she stopped caring about what I did or where I was, she's just look at me and not see _me_. I'd come home from school with bruises and blood and she wouldn't even notice. Only ever got mad at me for getting mess on the carpet that she would have to clean up. Course it was all sunshine and damn rainbows when Sam came home. Her perfect son who looked nothing like her dead husband, who didn't cause all her perfect damn dreams from crumbling down.

Bone's heart began to break; he always knew something was wrong with Jim's childhood but he had always passed it off as a lack of a father figure in his life; now he knew better. He slung his arm around Jim to let him know his friend was still her—Jim didn't need to face his demons alone anymore.

Jim, instead of resisting like Bones thought he would, raised his hand to loosely hold the arm around his shoulder, like an anchor. 'I thought that if I did better in school she would love me, if I skipped grades and only earned perfect reports from my teachers, and just studied all day, she would love me. For years I did everything to make me the best son I could be and so she would look at me and see her son. Everything I did only made it worse.'

The squall in those blue eyes was turning into a hurricane and it scared Bones.

'Everything I ever did only made it worse. And do you know why? Wanna know why she couldn't even stand the sight of me, let alone hug me, or kiss me good night, or even fucking look at me!'

Jim had pushed himself away from the wall and shot up to stand in front of Bones, facing the opposite wall. Every nerve his body seemed to be standing at attention, giving him a rigid, sharp look. And then he whipped around to face his friend with fire burning in his eyes.

'Cause I was reminder that her perfect fucking life had been blown all to hell the moment that I was born. She couldn't look at me and not see her dead husband looking back at her. It confused the hell out of me as a child, trying to figure out if my name was really Jim or if it was George. If you ask her I'm sure she couldn't give you the right damn answer. Want to know how hard it is living in the shadow of a damn hero when you don't even realize that it's a shadow. I gave everything I had to make her see me, and she only cared about ensuring that I would be there to stare at her when she came home. And once I realized that the bitch had been using me to see her husband, well she ran off into the stars and never looked back. Never mind what that fucking prick Frank was doing at home, she couldn't stand to be around someone so like George—the bloody patron saint of heroism in the Federation.'

Jim's hands were bunched into tight fist with white skin covering his knuckles as he stood in front of bones facing the window just to Bone's left. The doctor could only stare at him and realize that this was probably as personal as Jim was ever going to get, and he was damn well going to make the most of it. If Jim wanted to talk all night long, then damn it he wasn't a psychologist but he could be a friend. 'Jim,' he began, but stopped just after because really what do you say in response to that? Sorry your life sucked, but see where you are now?

So Bones patted the floor next to him, and Jim responded like a child and sat down but remained as tense as a cat in a room full of rockers. And there they sat for a long time as Jim slowly began to calm back down, until nothing about the Captain betrayed his previous anger.

Jim gave a small chuckle before turning to his friend, 'Sorry about that Bones, sometimes just thinking about that bitch gets me all worked up. I haven't spoken to her, or anyone in my family back dirt side, in maybe six years. I just used the farm house as a home base, ya know, when I was hopping through every bar in the Mid-West. I know she's alive somewhere, Star Fleet would have let me know if she wasn't, and God would the media be all over my ass. I wish they were.'

Hell. What was he supposed to say in response to that, what was he supposed to do with any of this crap? So Bones just sat there staring up at the one person who had made his divorce more manageable and had helped him get rights to see his daughter. And the effort he made at it suddenly became clear. Jim had been insuring that Joanne didn't have to suffer the way he had. Self-sacrificing idiot.

Forcing a smile on his face, Jim threw himself to his previous sitting position next to Bones before giving out a hallow laugh, 'What a pair of joker we are, huh? Both running away from the shitty truth that awaits us every time someone talks about family. Family—the one thing that I can search the universe for and still never find.'

'Nah, kid. You got the Enterprise. If the crew ain't your family at this point, hell I have no idea what you expected from one.' Bones nudged his shoulder into his brother before continuing to star up at the stars.

'Guess they are.' Jim paused for a moment before a face splitting grin broke his face into two. 'There's a whole lot of incest in this family, and a problem with the mama sleeping around.'

And really Bones had no response to that.

A/N: I feel so accomplished! I managed to get two stories out over Spring Break and each of them is over 6 pages long, except for the Sherlock Holmes piece but that one, that one doesn't count. I love when people compare the Enterprise to one large family but it causes a whole bunch of incest to occur so I just had to have Jim point that out to Bones, in a loving brotherly sense.

I believe that Winona didn't set out to be a horrible mother and person, just the problem is that her happiness and dreams were shattered when the Kelvin was destroyed, and she loved George too much to let him go. But sadly this meant that she loved and hated anything that reminded her of the fact he was gone—mainly Jim. So she's not a child abuser, more like a child leaver.


End file.
